“If you’re used to bringing in all your freight into Baltimore and that goes to a local facility, now you’ve got freight that’s going to be hundreds or thousands of miles away from that original entry point, which means you’re going to have additional transportation costs,” he said.

Shippers also could be charged fees that are sometimes assessed for not removing containers quickly enough from a port. And they could face increased trucking costs to transport goods to end users.

“You’re going to see inflationary pressure to the end user, the consumer, just like we did post-Covid, probably not that bad, but there will be additional transportation costs,” Brashier said. “We’re trying to insulate our clients as much as possible from additional charges and be a good steward. The hope is other folks, the ocean carriers and terminals, would do the same.”

Baltimore’s port, a major hub for importing and exporting cars, light trucks and bulk goods, will likely face a shutdown for at least three months, some in the industry believe. If supply chains begin to leave Baltimore out, the effects could linger many months longer, experts believe.

Another logistics company, C.H. Robinson, which handles shipping by ocean, air, truck and rail, said Wednesday it’s been making plans for containers on ships rerouted to places such as New York, New Jersey or Norfolk, Virginia.

“We’re already making alternative plans to pick up those containers and arrange for truck or rail transportation from the new ports,” C. Matt Castle, vice president of global forwarding, said in an email. “For shipments that haven’t departed yet, we’re helping customers retrieve those containers from the Port of Baltimore and get them on their way.”

But with the Key Bridge gone, trucks will face delays, especially those traveling from the south and using I-95 or I-895 tunnels or navigating around the harbor, a detour that could add an hour to trips, he said.

“The good news for customers with containers that had already arrived at the port is that we can get drivers in to access their freight,” Castle said. And, though rail service to the port from places such as Chicago has been suspended, it’s likely to start up again this week, enabling cargo loaded onto trains to move inland.

Tinglong Dai, a professor at Johns Hopkins Carey Business School in the area of Operations Management and Business Analytics, said during a Wednesday panel at Hopkins that the shutdown will hurt Baltimore in the short run but is not expected to have a big impact on the global supply chain, which has become flexible and resilient.

Even at the port, the impact will vary, he said. Though the port plays a major role in automobile imports and exports, not all automakers at the port are impacted. BMW and Volkswagen each having terminals outside the area of the bridge collapse. But companies such as General Motors or Ford are affected.

“The impact is relatively local. It’s definitely not a national supply-chain crisis and won’t trigger a global supply-chain crisis. I don’t want to downplay the impact, but resilience has been built into global supply chains,” Tinglong Dai said.

Natalie M. Scala, an associate professor at Towson University who directs the graduate program in supply chain management, raised concerns about ships stuck at the port with no way to distribute products.

“The immediate impacts, in terms of a supply change component: it’s the port being clear and open,” Scala said. “The bridge, obviously, is important. But the economic impact in Baltimore and this region and the eastern seaboard is the actual product in and out of the port itself.”

(Baltimore Sun reporters Maya Lora and Jonathan M. PItts contributed to this article.)

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